AutoCAD 2009 – Top reasons to be Ribbonless

I’ve closed the poll for those of you who are using 2009 with the Ribbon turned off to show us the reasons why. The top 10 choices were:

Tab concept means extra clicks (65%)

Uses up too much screen space (64%)

No advantage over existing methods (64%)

Dislike concept of hiding tools – want buttons to stay visible (60%)

Too hard to find things (51%)

Using it minimised requires an extra click/hover (47%)

Doesn’t make good use of my screen size/shape (45%)

Tab switching is too slow (45%)

Customising it is too difficult (44%)

Ribbon content doesn’t match my needs (44%)

I was hoping that the poll would help Autodesk in deciding how best to improve the Ribbon in future releases, but it’s pretty hard to do much about the top 7 choices here. Except number 2, perhaps; the Ribbon could be considerably tightened to remove waste space, in the same way as the excellent AutoCAD 2009 floating toolbars.

The new poll is slightly related to item 5 above. Autodesk combined the Ribbon with a change to the button images. Personally, I don’t think this was a good idea. If you move people’s stuff around, changing the appearance of that stuff is only going to make it harder to find things and reduce people’s acceptance of the changed interface. Enough of my opinion, what do you think?

I like the ribbon, but I’m biased. I’m a keyboarder so i don’t spend time hunting through the ribbon. I pull out the few tabs I use and type the rest. I think it works great. Now, if I didn’t use the keyboard, admittedly, I probably wouldn’t like it as much for the reason stated above. I would probably pull it apart and have the tabs all around like they were toolbars. But I like it.

It’s very stupid to use ribbons. I hate this new trend in applications. Now when almost all of the monitors are widescreen, ribbons make them wider. We should be using left and right command buttons to benefit from 16:9.

The ribbon is the most pointless waste of time I have ever witnessed in the history of software development – things are meant to progress and move forwards, not backwards – the only people who use are those who dont know better or dont know / scared to customise autocad – its an ineficiant waste of everyones time. I will stop using cad in the menu bars go and will encourage my company to do so.